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Crimes of the Heartland

LIKE most of his previous work, Tom Drury’s latest novel could just as well be titled, “What’s the Matter With Iowa?” This is not the heartland as we’ve been led to understand it. Anything but the repository of American normalcy, Drury’s raggedy slice of the Midwest teems with vagrants and thieves, even a drug dealer who doubles as a rental car agent. An air of agreeable defeatism hangs over its inhabitants. They’re good company, however — all the more so because Drury’s fiction comes equipped with a trap door. In the case of “The Driftless Area,” his 24-year-old bartender protagonist falls through an icy lake but is saved by a mysterious woman who has been waiting for some time to make his life more complicated.

The bartender, Pierre Hunter, is an obliging fall guy. In the opening pages, his pneumonia-stricken girlfriend breaks up with him from her hospital bed. Later, he’s arrested after attending a party, wandering off and returning by mistake to the wrong house, where an entirely different party is taking place — and then trying to assuage the alarmed host with a coin trick. That Pierre would spend the night in jail, agree to cop a plea and then promptly fall through thin ice is altogether unsurprising.

Pierre’s love affair with the woman who saves him is evoked with a cynic’s shy romanticism: “They made love all through the night. It was hot in the room and then cooler as the early morning drifted in the windows, until at last they shivered under the covers, played out and a little deranged. There was a light on, a standing lamp with an orange shade. The wiring was bad and it kept going on and off. Sometimes it would stay on for a while and then again it would strobe, and the light in its changeable modes seemed to urge them on.”

Drury is an enormously skilled if at times exasperating storyteller, a guy you’d hate to play poker with. He delights in lulling the reader with meandering yet entertaining dialogue:

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At the same time, a sneaky humaneness pervades Drury’s writing. In his wonderful first novel, “The End of Vandalism,” the protagonist’s stillborn child is juxtaposed with an abandoned baby who somehow survives. His other two novels, “The Black Brook” and “Hunts in Dreams,” offer tender glimpses of marriages in midcollapse. Drury’s luckless characters are seldom weepy and don’t beg for mercy, yet even the villain in “The Driftless Area,” a thief named Shane from whom Pierre swipes $77,000 (which he gives away), dreams about a woman he accidentally killed. But before things get too serious, Drury returns us to the banter of Pierre’s bar, the Jack of Diamonds.

The book’s title refers to an actual geological anomaly in the Midwest that sat undisturbed while the continental glacier receded. Wisely, Drury doesn’t overplay the metaphor, but he does challenge the reader’s patience in the book’s plunge into the mystical. “The Driftless Area” builds up surprising locomotion as Shane pursues the hapless Pierre. The conclusion is an absolute thrill, until it suddenly leaps off the rails. Characters we’re perfectly content to hang with on mortal turf ultimately descend further through the author’s trap door and then up into ... well, let’s just say it isn’t Des Moines.

This fine, ambling novel ends with a tug of war between the spiritual we don’t altogether trust and the grind we’re somehow unable to resist. As Pierre has already observed, “everything that succeeds creates the conditions for its own demise. ... The only things that might last are things that make no difference.” Which is to say: drift rules, and nothing’s the matter with Iowa.

Robert Draper, a correspondent for GQ, is the author of a novel, “Hadrian’s Walls.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 725 of the New York edition with the headline: Crimes of the Heartland. Today's Paper|Subscribe